Assessment & Interventions
In This Article:
Adolescents struggle with reading for many different reasons. For example, they may have a reading disability, such as dyslexia, that went undiagnosed in elementary school. They may simply never have had the kind of systematic, high-quality basic reading instruction that they should have received in the early grades. And — as is true of most struggling adolescent readers — they may be able to decode text but need help with other skills, particularly reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Given the variety of factors that can cause students to struggle with reading, it makes little sense to offer everybody the same, one-size-fits-all reading program. That's why most elementary schools have, over many years, put in place assessment systems that can identify specific reading problems or disabilities, so that students can be given appropriate kinds of instruction and support.
At the secondary level, though, such systems are rare, and many schools lack in-house reading specialists trained to conduct assessments and to judge whether a given student is most in need of phonics instruction, English immersion, vocabulary instruction, or another kind of support.
Further, when middle and high schools do identify students for extra support in reading, they often group them all together, placing all struggling readers into a single, catch-all (and usually ineffective) remedial course — and that course often focuses on the basic mechanics of reading, even though students more often need help with fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
That must change. Not only must the nation's secondary schools develop the capacity to assess students' specific strengths and weaknesses in reading, but they must follow through on those assessments by providing whatever kinds of instruction are indicated, even if that means creating a whole new reading program for some students and providing one-on-one tutoring for others.
Moreover, the goal of those services must be to help students to catch up to grade level as soon as possible. Historically, remedial reading courses have tended to be a dead end for the students assigned to them. Today, the catch-phrase is to "accelerate, not remediate." Whatever the nature of the program — whether schools choose a commercial reading intervention or design their own; whether it focuses on decoding or reading fluency, English language or comprehension strategies-it should be designed to help students to make up lost ground quickly. Thus, many schools are now experimenting with ways to squeeze extra time into the schedule for reading interventions, whether by taking time away from elective courses or by teaching reading early in the morning, after school, on the weekends, or over the summer.
